AUTOMATIC BORDER DELINEATION AND DIMENSIONING OF REGIONS USING CONTRAST ENHANCED IMAGING

摘要

The present invention is a novel system and method for automaticallyidentifying borders of regions of interest within an image of a patient'sorgan or tissue. The system generates images - before, during and after theadministration of a contrast agent. Once the set of images have been taken,the system begins automatic processing of the images. The steps of theprocessing include the identification of baseline image frames, identificationof baseline intensities for each given pixel in the ROI, baseline subtractionon a per-pixel basis, determining a probability of signal-to-noise ratio foreach pixel, and thresholding each pixel to determine if a pixel belongs to anarea inside the border region or an area outside the border region. To exactlydetermine which pixels that are at the border, the method refines the set bylocally minimizing a total cost function that relates a low value to pointstypically found on a contrast enhanced image. The border of the region ofinterest is thereby determined.